Moonlight mating
Thank you to Jouke, Lya and Jouke Anne De Ruiter for their hospitality and for organizing the speaker to talk to us about moonlight mating.
We all had a very enjoyable and educational evening.
For those of you unable to attend, the gist of the talk is that the drones and queens are confined to the first floor and kept in the dark during the day. The worker bees can however make their way through the queen excluder
to the ground floor and out of the hive to forage.
After 6pm , once the feral drones have stopped flying the bottom entrance is closed and the top entrance opened allowing the queens and drones out to mate. This first floor entrance is left open for 3 hours during which time the mating is completed and the queens returned back to the hive. That entrance is closed again and the bottom entrance re-opened for the workers bees to use during the day.
We all had a very enjoyable and educational evening.
For those of you unable to attend, the gist of the talk is that the drones and queens are confined to the first floor and kept in the dark during the day. The worker bees can however make their way through the queen excluder
to the ground floor and out of the hive to forage.
After 6pm , once the feral drones have stopped flying the bottom entrance is closed and the top entrance opened allowing the queens and drones out to mate. This first floor entrance is left open for 3 hours during which time the mating is completed and the queens returned back to the hive. That entrance is closed again and the bottom entrance re-opened for the workers bees to use during the day.
